Existentialism: Historical Background

1
Existentialism Historical Background

• Meaning and its locale
• Authenticity

2
1.1. Introduction

• When I consider the brief span of my life,
  swallowed up in the eternity before and behind
  it, the small space that I fill, or even see,
  engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces
  which I know not, and which know not me, I am
  afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than
  there for there is no reason why I should be
  here rather than there, now, rather than then.
• Pascal, Thoughts of Pascal

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• Rarely has the existential question been put
  more simply or beautifully. In this passage we
  see, first, the profound realization of the
  contingency of human life, which existentialists
  call thrownness. Second, we see Pascal facing
  unflinchingly the question of being there or more
  accurately, being where? Third, we see the
  realization that one cannot take refuge in some
  superficial explanation of time and space, which
  Pascal, scientist that he was, could well know
  and lastly, the deep shaking anxiety arising from
  this stark awareness of existence in such a
  universe.
• May, R. Existence Origins of the Existential
  Movement

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1.2. Definition

• Existentialism is not a comprehensive
  philosophy, or way of life, but an endeavour to
  grasp reality... existentialism is immersed in
  and arises directly out of Western mans anxiety,
  estrangement, and conflicts. Like psychoanalysis,
  existentialism seeks to... utilize these very
  conflicts... as avenues to the more profound
  self-understanding of Western man.
• May, R. Existence Origins of the Existential
  Movement
• In many ways existentialism is the unique and
  specific portrayal of the psychological
  predicament of contemporary Western man....
• May, R. Existence Origins of the Existential
  Movement

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We can see more clearly the significance of the
term existentialism if we recall that
traditionally in Western thought existence has
been set over against essence. Essence refers
to the greenness of this stick of wood, let us
say, and its density, weight, and other
characteristics which give it substance. By and
large Western thought since the Renaissance has
been concerned with essence. Traditional science
seeks to discover such essences or substances it
assumes an essentialist metaphysics. But it can
only do this by abstraction. The existence of the
given individual thing has to be left out of the
picture.

• May, R. Existence Origins of the Existential
  Movement.

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"Existentialism is not a school of thought nor
reducible to any set of tenets. The three writers
who appear invariably on every list of
'existentialists' - Jaspers, Heidegger, and
Sartre - are not in agreement on essentials. Such
alleged precursors as Pascal and Kierkegaard
differed from all three men by being dedicated
Christians and Pascal was a Catholic of sorts,
while Kierkegaard was a Protestant's Protestant.
If, as is often done, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
are included in the fold, we must make room for
an impassioned anti-Christian and an even more
fanatical Greek-Orthodox Russian imperialist. By
the time we consider adding RiIke, Kafka, Ortega,
and Camus, it becomes plain that one essential
feature shared by all these men is their
perfervid individualism.The refusal to belong to
any school of thought, the repudiation of the
adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and
especially of systems, and a marked
dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as
superficial, academic, and remote from life -
that is the heart of existentialism"

• Walter Kaufmann

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Rejection of the rational man man as thinking
(or even sensing) subject - substitution, the
individual in motion

• the division of object and subject
• the object as abstract entity
• the subject as compartmentalized efficient
  industrial man
• the division of science and ethics
• the relation between outer and inner
  fragmentation (Freud)
• the slavery of the self (as a substitute (?) for
  the slavery of others)?
• the division of labour
• the reduction of reason to technique

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The concept of alienation

• The created object exists in opposition to the
  creator
• the father vs the son (mythologically speaking)
• dogma vs spirit
• the dead hero vs the live individual
• history vs the present
• untruth is alienation (motivated by cowardice)

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The vitality of the subjective (value vs
objective fact?)

• Truth is not a thing, it is a relationship -- a
  manner of being, not a manner of conception.
• we cannot be content to view truth
  disinterestedly, objectively.
• Truth as freedom (for Kierkegaard for Nietzsche,
  truth enhances life)
• Truth in terms of relationship to the fact and
  commitment (demonstrated in action)
• Can one live it? All truths are bloody truths to
  me. (Nietzsche)

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Central tenet life as experienced.

• exemplar statistical death vs real death
• Truth exists only as the individual himself
  produces it in action.
• Away from Speculation, away from the System, and
  back to reality.
• Kierkegaard.

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2.0. Prophets of The Dawning Age

• Outline
• The Inevitability of Nihilism
• The Insufficiency of Reason
• The Necessity of Difficulty
• The Crowd as the Lie
• The Individual as Truth
• Influence on Freud
• Conclusion

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2.1. The Inevitability of Nihilism Friedrich
Nietzsche
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2.1. The Inevitability of Nihilism Friedrich
Nietzsche

• Of what is great one must either be silent or
  speak with greatness. With greatness - that means
  cynically and with innocence. What I relate is
  the history of the next two centuries.
• I describe what is coming, what can no longer
  come differently the advent of nihilism. . . Our
  whole European culture is moving for some time
  now, with a tortured tension that is growing from
  decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe
  restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river
  that wants to reach the end, that no longer
  reflects, that is afraid to reflect.
• He that speaks here has, conversely, done nothing
  so far but to reflect as a philosopher and
  solitary by instinct who has found his advantage
  in standing aside, outside.

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• Why has the advent of nihilism become necessary?
• Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw
  their final consequence because nihilism
  represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our
  great values and ideals-because we must
  experience nihilism before we can find out what
  value these "values" really had.
• We require, at some time, new values. Nihilism
  stands at the door whence comes this uncanniest
  of all guests?

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• Point of departure it is an error to consider
  "social distress" or "physiological
  degeneration," or corruption of all things, as
  the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most honest
  and compassionate age.
• Distress, whether psychic, physical, or
  intellectual, need not at all produce nihilism
  (that is, the radical rejection of value,
  meaning, and desirability).
• Such distress always permits a variety of
  interpretations.
• Rather it is in one particular interpretation,
  the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted.
• The end of Christianity-at the hands of its own
  morality (which cannot be replaced), which turns
  against the Christian God the sense of
  truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity,
  is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness
  of all Christian interpretations of the world and
  of history rebound from "God is the truth" to
  the fanatical faith "All is false" an active
  Buddhism.

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• Skepticism regarding morality is what is
  decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of
  the world, which no longer has any sanction after
  it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to
  nihilism. "All lacks meaning."
• (The untenability of one interpretation of the
  world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy
  has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all
  interpretations of the world are false.)
• Nietzsche, The Will to Power

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2.2. The Insufficiency of Reason Fyodor
Dostoevsky
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2.2. The Insufficiency of Reason Fyodor
Dostoevsky

• In short, one may say anything about the history
  of the world - anything that might enter the most
  disordered imagination. The only thing one can't
  say is that it's rational. The very word sticks
  in one's throat.
• And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is
  continually happening there are continually
  turning up in life moral and rational persons,
  sages and lovers of humanity who make it their
  object to live all their lives as morally and
  rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a
  light to their neighbours simply in order to show
  them that it is possible to live morally and
  rationally in this world.

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2.2. The Insufficiency of Reason Fyodor
Dostoevsky

• And yet we all know that those very people sooner
  or later have been false to themselves, playing
  some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.
• Now I ask you what can be expected of man since
  he is a being endowed with such strange qualities?

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• Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him
  in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but
  bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface give
  him economic prosperity, such that he should have
  nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy
  himself with the continuation of his species, and
  even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite,
  man would play you some nasty trick.
• He would even risk his cakes and would
  deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the
  most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce
  into all this positive good sense his fatal
  fantastic element.

21

• It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly
  that he will desire to retain, simply in order to
  prove to himself-as though that were so necessary
  - that men still are men and not the keys of a
  piano, which the laws of nature threaten to
  control so completely that soon one will be able
  to desire nothing but by the calendar.

22

• And that is not all even if man really were
  nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved
  to him by natural science and mathematics, even
  then he would not become reasonable, but would
  purposely do something perverse out of simple
  ingratitude, simply to gain his point.
• And if he does not find means he will contrive
  destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings
  of all sorts, only to gain his point!

23

• He will launch a curse upon the world, and as
  only man can curse (it is his privilege, the
  primary distinction between him and other
  animals), may be by his curse alone he will
  attain his object-that is, convince himself that
  he is a man and not a piano-key!
• If you say that all this, too, can be calculated
  and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so
  that the mere possibility of calculating it all
  beforehand would stop it all, and reason would
  reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad
  in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!

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• I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole
  work of man really seems to consist in nothing
  but proving to himself every minute that he is a
  man and not a piano-key!
• It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by
  cannibalism!
• And this being so, can one help being tempted to
  rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that
  desire still depends on something we don't know?

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• You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend
  to do so) that no one is touching my free will,
  that all they are concerned with is that my will
  should of itself, of its own free will, coincide
  with my own normal interests, with the laws of
  nature and arithmetic.
• Good Heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will
  is left when we come to tabulation and
  arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice
  two make four?
• Twice two makes four without my will. As if free
  will meant that!
• Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

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2.3. The Necessity of Difficulty Soren
Kierkegaard

• It is now about four years ago that I got the
  notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I
  remember it quite clearly it was on a Sunday,
  yes, that's it, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated
  as usual, out-of-doors at the cafe in the
  Frederiksberg Garden . . .
• I had been a student for half a score of years.
  Although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless
  was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of
  occupation for which I still have a great
  partiality, and for which perhaps I even have a
  little genius.

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• I read much, spent the remainder of the day
  idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but
  that was all it came to... So there I sat and
  smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought.
• Among other thoughts I remember these "You are
  going on," I said to myself, "to become an old
  man, without being anything, and without really
  undertaking to do any-thing.

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• On the other hand, wherever you look about you,
  in literature and in life, you see the celebrated
  names and figures, the precious and much heralded
  men who are coming into prominence and are much
  talked about, the many benefactors of the age who
  know how to benefit mankind by making life easier
  and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses
  and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others
  by easily apprehended compendiums and short
  recitals of everything worth knowing,
• and finally the true benefactors of the age who
  make spiritual existence in virtue of thought
  easier and easier, yet more and more significant.
  And what are you doing?"

29

• Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar
  was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I
  smoked again, and then suddenly this thought
  flashed through my mind
• "You must do something, but inasmuch as with your
  limited capacities it will be impossible to make
  anything easier than it has become, you must,
  with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the
  others, undertake to make something harder."

30

• This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same
  time it flattered me to think that I, like the
  rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the
  whole community.
• For when all combine in every way to make
  everything easier, there remains only one
  possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so
  great that it becomes altogether too great then
  there is only one want left, though it is not yet
  a felt want, when people will want difficulty.

31

• Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my
  embarrassing situation, seeing that I had
  accomplished nothing and was unable to make
  anything easier than it had already been made,
  and moved by a genuine interest in those who make
  everything easy, I conceived it as my task to
  create difficulties everywhere.
• Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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2.4. The Crowd as the Lie Soren Kierkegaard

• There is a view of life which conceives that
  where the crowd is, there also is the truth, and
  that in truth itself there is need of having the
  crowd on its side.
• There is another view of life which conceives
  that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth,
  so that (to consider for a moment the extreme
  case), even if every individual, each for himself
  in private, were to be in possession of the
  truth, yet in case they were all to get together
  in a crowd - a crowd to which any sort of
  decisive significance is attributed, a voting,
  noisy, audible crowd - untruth would at once be
  in evidence.

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• For a "crowd" is the untruth. In a godly sense it
  is true, eternally, Christianity, as St. Paul
  says, that "only one attains the goal"- which is
  not meant in a comparative sense, for comparison
  takes others into account.
• It means that every man can be that one, God
  helping him therein - but only one attains the
  goal.

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• And again this means that every man should be
  chary about having to do with "the others," and
  essentially should talk only with God and with
  himself - for only one attains the goal.
• And again this means that man, or to be a man, is
  akin to deity.
• In a worldly and temporal sense, it will be said
  by the man of bustle, sociability, and
  amicableness, "How unreasonable that only one
  attains the goal for it is far more likely that
  many, by the strength of united effort, should
  attain the goal and when we are many success is
  more certain and it is easier for each man
  severally."

35

• True enough, it is far more likely and it is
  true also with respect to all earthly and
  material goods. If it is allowed to have its way,
  this becomes the only true point of view, for it
  does away with God and eternity and with man's
  kinship with deity.
• It does away with it or transforms it into a
  fable, and puts in its place the modern (or, we
  might rather say, the old pagan) notion that to
  be a man is to belong to a race endowed with
  reason, to belong to it as a specimen, so that
  the race or species is higher than the in
  dividual, which is to say that there are no more
  individuals but only specimens.

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• But eternity which arches over and high above the
  temporal, tranquil as the starry vault at night,
  and God in heaven who in the bliss of that
  sublime tranquillity holds in survey, without the
  least sense of dizziness at such a height, those
  countless multitudes of men and knows each single
  individual by name - He, the Great Examiner, says
  that only one attains the goal.
• Kierkegaard, That Individual Two Notes
  Concerning My Work as an Author

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2.5. The Individual as Truth Friedrich Nietzsche

• A traveler who had seen many countries and
  peoples and several continents was asked what
  human traits he had found everywhere and he
  answered men are inclined to laziness.
• Some will feel that he might have said with
  greater justice they are all timorous. They hide
  behind customs and opinions.
• At bottom, every human being knows very well that
  he is in this world just once, as something
  unique, and that no accident, however strange,
  will throw together a second time into a unity
  such a curious and diffuse plurality he knows
  it, but hides it like a bad conscience-why?

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• From fear of his neighbor who insists on
  convention and veils himself with it.
• But what is it that compels the individual human
  being to fear his neighbor, to think and act
  herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself?
• A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases.
  In the vast majority it is the desire for
  comfort, inertia-in short, that inclination to
  laziness of which the traveler spoke.

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• He is right men are even lazier than they are
  timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles
  with which any unconditional honesty and nudity
  would burden them.
• Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed
  manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil
  the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the
  principle that every human being is a unique
  wonder they dare to show us the human being as
  he is, down to the last muscle, himself and
  himself alone - even more, that in this rigorous
  consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and
  worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as
  every work of nature, and by no means dull.

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• When a great thinker despises men, it is their
  laziness that he despises for it is on account
  of this that they have the appearance of factory
  products and seem indifferent and unworthy of
  companionship or instruction.
• The human being who does not wish to belong to
  the mass must merely cease being comfortable with
  himself let him follow his conscience which
  shouts at him
• "Be yourself! What you are at present doing,
  opining, and desiring, that is not really you.
• Nietzsche, Untimely Meditation on Schopenhauer as
  Educator

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Authenticity

• Kierkegaard antipathy to the mass man
• the inauthentic subject has become his own
  object the pathology of self-consciousness
• Nietzsche will to power
• Mans task is simple he should cease letting his
  existence be a thoughtless accident.... In the
  Gay Science, Nietzsche hits on a fomulation which
  brings out the essential paradox of any
  distinction between self and true self What
  does your conscience say? - You shall become who
  you are.
• Kaufman, Walter.

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3.0. Conclusion Part One

• And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly,
  convinced -that only the normal and the
  positive-in other words, only what is conducive
  to welfare-is for the advantage of man? h not
  reason in error as regards advantage?
• Does not man, perhaps, love something besides
  well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of
  suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a
  benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes
  extraordinarily, passionately, in love with
  suffering, and that is a fact.

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3.0. Conclusion Part One

• There is no need to appeal to universal history
  to prove that only ask yourself, if you are a
  man and have lived at all. As far as my personal
  opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being
  seems to me positively ill-bred.
• Whether it's good or bad, it is sometiines very
  pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief
  for suffering nor for well-being either. I am
  standing for . . . my caprice, and for its being
  guaranteed to me when necessary.
• Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles,
  for instance I know that.

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• In the Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable
  suffering means doubt, negation, and what would
  be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there
  could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man
  will never renounce real suffering, that is,
  destruction and chaos.
• Why, suffering is the sole origin of
  consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the
  beginning that consciousness is the greatest
  misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and
  would not give it up for any satisfaction.
• Dostoevski, F. (1864). Translated by Walter
  Kaufmann

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Utopia the crystal palace
46
3.0. Conclusion Part Two

• We are now in a position to see the crucial
  significance of the existential psychotherapy
  movement. It is precisely the movement that
  protests against the tendency to identify
  psychotherapy with technical reason.
• We have seen that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as
  well as the representatives of the existential
  cultural movement following them, not only
  contributed far-reaching and penetrating
  psychological insights, which in themselves form
  a significant contribution to anyone seeking
  scientifically to understand modern psychological
  problems, but also did something else - they
  placed these insights on an ontological basis,
  namely, the study of man as the being who has
  these particular problems.

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3.0. Conclusion Part Two

• They believed that it was absolutely necessary
  that this be done, and they feared that the
  subordination of reason to technical problems
  would ultimately mean the making of man over in
  the image of the machine.
• May, Origins.